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The original reason for DST: Stores and parks did not want to change the signs that said when they would open, but they wanted to be open during daylight. However, this history does not mention that: Daylight Saving Time history.

Solar noon has ZERO relationship to the number 12 on our clocks.

Right, not any more, but prior to trains needing synchronized clocks, solar noon was 12 noon everywhere.

Standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads on November 18, 1883. Prior to that, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by a well-known clock (on a church steeple, for example, or in a jeweler's window).

That's a pretty strong relationship between 12 and noon.

Looks like the American's didn't start it... http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/e.html/

"English-speaking North America" is not the only place "daylight saving time" is used, so your entire argument is dead.

When is Daylight Saving Time worldwide?

The earliest uses of a synthetic titanium oxide, not of pigmentary quality, were during the late 1800s as opacifiers and additives to increase acid resistance in glazes and vitreous enamels.

A blue porcelain glaze using hydrous titanic oxide was described in 1841. Titanium compounds of all kinds were investigated for use in the late 1800s in the textile industry, including titanium oxide as a mordant for wool, also not the calcined white pigment

And titanium dioxide was discovered in 1821.

Again, there is no "evidence" that titanium was so rare back in the 1970s.

There is a long tradition of US diplomats making scientific observations abroad. Franklin discovered the existence of sunrise in Paris, for example: http://www.webexhibits.org/day...

Statistically, it doesn't matter. When people run polls, how do they know how many people are lying to them? That's why they use large samples, so the signal can rise above the noise.

Interesting point, but let's be clear. If I happen to be a politician and want to make the economy look good, would I poll every citizen in the US for their feelings on the economy? I believe that I would I target people that are employed, working in particular fields, living in certain types of neighborhoods. This is how statistics are done used to present an invalid/biased view of the world. Anyone believing that the economy is healthy in the US is an idiot, but politicians can show you this all day long with statistical backing. Statistics rarely show the truth of things, so invalid example all the way around.

You'd be extremely unlikely to do so, and even if you did, as long as you sample enough zebra paintings, its noise would be swamped by the signal. Most zebra paintings would show a realistic, if not 100% accurate, size and number of stripes, especially if the artist could look out of his window and see a zebra.

Nope, sorry. You seem to be very ignorant about art and a quick Google search yields how wrong you are. "Realism" is not even audible noise in the traffic, it barely exists.

My understanding of the paper is that they looked not only at red/green ratios per painting, but also red/green ratio changes within the painting. That will have removed some of the kind of uncertainty you're talking about.

Did you do any of my suggested study on paints? Here is a primer, then go look at Audion's paintings and see how the colors vary from picture to picture. Dilution causes variances as does ingredients. This is not the artist capturing the 'real color of the sky', but the artist mixing paints for the effect they desire.

There are thousands of references to why artists strive for emotion in paintings, not realism. There is almost no information on why artists strive for realism without emotion. People that teach artists will tell you never put realism above emotion. This is not just the abstract, but people painting family pictures. Here is yet another quick Google result.

The human retina actually does some pre-processing before the pixel data (input from rods and cones) goes further along the visual circuits. One of the most basic tasks is edge enhancement and based on red-green, blue-yellow and intensity values based on a large sample of input data:
http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/ganglion.html

In image processing speak, these are called edge detection and contrast detection. If there is an intensity difference between two areas, then one is darker than the other, and vice versa. This difference gets amplified close to the border between the two edges. So the human eye can immediately tell there is some kind of edge. For the application of painting, having a split view would allow the artist to immediately tell when the source color (the scene) and the destination color (the painting) matched. Professional cameras use a similar mechanism for perfecting focus:

http://www.diyphotography.net/files/images/3228644_6c2e9a2ba1_m.jpg

So the artist could just start off with a very basic poster paint color scheme, then gradually add the shadows and the highlights.

An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light

Uh, history here?

Before Timezones, bad things happened especially with Railroads. The adoption of standard time was therefore driven by the railroads and was first suggested by the Brits. It seems however in this case with the BBC, they've forgotten that.

Blame Benjamin Franklin!

It was actually he who suggested it!

http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.html

It is very witty!

10% of men are colorblind, which boils down to about 5% of the general population. That said, the vast majority of colorblind people still see color, we just don't see it quite right. This gallery demonstrates how people with different types of colorblindness see various pictures.

"Would you like to be cured?"

Problem solved.

Exactly... I understand the general point, but this is a lousy example to showcase it. Better, because there's actually a "vocal" group devoted it, are deaf people and cochlear implants. "Fixing" deaf people is seen as a cultural change there... they lose a language (sign) and etc.

Regarding color blindness in particular though... I understand birds have a much richer palette of colors they can see than we do. While I wouldn't sign up to be a beta tester for THAT mod... I'd be interested in that enhancement after it's perfected.

But a lot of these questions are only simple if nobody wants to know or understand the details.

For instance - is water blue? Why?

http://www.webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/5B.html

Turns out D2O is more colourless than H2O.

After that the light has to reach your eyes, the retina and then perceived in the brain somewhere.

Because the retina experiences "afterimage" effects and the brain also determines the colour of what it is seeing by context. You could see the exact same colour, but think it's a different shade based on the context.

Galileo was pushing the sun-centered universe and was persecuted by the Church for it.

That's not true. The Church were quite happy with the heliocentric version of the way the solar system worked - it meant that by using those calculations, they could determine the exact date of Easter much more precisely. Previously their system had Easter moving throughout the year unpredictably, whereas under a heliocentric system it could be pinned down to within a month.

They persecuted Galileo because he had some un-politically correct things to say about the church and the Pope. That didn't stop them using the calculations though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei#Church_controversy

By 1616 the attacks on Galileo had reached a head, and he went to Rome to try to persuade the Church authorities not to ban his ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and the church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission.

Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo's book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. This fact made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book; an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defense of the Copernican theory. To add insult to injury[neutrality disputed], Galileo put the words of Pope Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[90] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the blatant bias. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.

So this tell us that by using a character called Simplicio as the geocentric supporter in the book, and making him appear an idiot, having Simplicio repeat the words of the Pope made the Pope look like an idiot. This is what damned Galileo, not heliocentrism.

The Vatican Supported Astronomy
Did the Church Study Astronomy ?

1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)

2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)

3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)

4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)

5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)

I am not certain how easy it is to "capture" HTML to read on the Kindle later but here are some decent translations in English if you want them.

Well, to answer your question, in all seriousness, take a look at the Butter Crock, also known as a Butter Bell.
http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/crocks.html

All it requires are two pottery bowls, and some water. The water creates the airtight seal. The trick is that it's only useful for something that's sticky enough to click to the upside down bowl. Hence, it's discovery in application to the storage of butter. It was well known in France by the Middle Ages, and might have conceivably be used as early as the Greek and Roman days. We know that the Greeks understood the concept of buoyancy and the displacement of water with air, by way of Archimedes. They definitely had the technology and understanding of physics to do this kind of experiment.

Regarding germ theory, I'd point out that one of the greek goddesses, Hygeia, daughter of Aesclepius, was known for the healing power of cleanliness. She was supposed to have introduced the idea of washing patients with soap and water, and had lots of hospital shrines. Hence, our modern word 'hygiene'.

My guess is that there were plenty of people who worked out simple experiments that disproved spontaneous generation, particularly within the healthcare community. But lack of printing presses and the difficulty in replicating the experiments led to the results of those experiments not being widely disseminated. Or, possibly, the people performing said experiments didn't realize the scope of what they were testing for.

In hind sight, we can say 'oh, the greeks never worked out a single experiment to disprove spontaneous generation!'. Whereas, would say that they never phrased it in those terms. Rather, they were asking themselves 'why does this butter go bad so quickly?' and 'how can we make butter last longer without spoiling?'. Then, they do some experiments, a couple of them find out that a Butter Bell works to keep butter longer, and it's a practice that's adopted in a couple communities. But without printing presses and mass communications, the concept didn't spread, and was probably rediscovered dozens or hundreds of times, until it caught on permanently in France.

The waterfall method is still the best development model.

That's funny because the waterfall model was first described by Winston Royce in a two-part article using it as a fictional "bad" approach to software engineering.

Due to the two-part setup of the article, many people only read the first part that described the waterfall model but not the second part where he lays out just why it is a bad model. Consequently, thousands of papers have gone on to cite Royce's paper as the source of the model without realizing that his only reason for describing it was to discredit it.

Kind of like the way people often refer to Ben Franklin as the creator of "daylight savings time" when in fact it was a big joke.

Actually, I started off by calling candidates who would support your ideas idiots. So you can cut your half a dozen times down quite a bit.

Your better defense would have been to admit that you don't write well enough for anyone to discern precisely who you are insulting. Given that you have spewed insults on a couple of continents of people it is pretty clear you aren't that discriminating anyway.

Well, first off what did he lie to congress about? Are you talking about the state of the union address that was corrected the very next day and anyone with access to a radio, TV, or newspaper would have known that.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that 2nd sentence was a question. It's as good a place to start as any because it is utter nonsense and fiction, as usual.

Ignoring the significant evidence otherwise, let's assume the Niger uranium story made its way into the speech "by accident". You would be the only person to remember such an immediate correction. I refuse to play the game where you pull something out of your ass and I spend time proving you're lying. So show me the proof. Give me a traceable citation from January 29, 2003 to prove what you say. It should be easy, right?

On the other hand, here is a statement from the White House 2 and 1/2 months later repeating the same lie.

Or are you talking about the WMDs that there was specific inteligence (sic) to support. Hell, All during the Clinton years, the idea was the same and then all the after 2 years in office we are supposed to ignore all that because france said it wasn't true. well, here's a hint. France hasn't won a war in so long, nobody trusts their positions because they know it leads to defeat.

Wow, right out of the right wing lunatic play book. Never admit mistakes. Blame Clinton and the French, instead. Keep running that play for another election cycle or two, please!

Yup, a brilliant Bush move. Ignore the French. So what if they had much better contacts within the Hussein government than the US? They eat cheese! And ignore the Germans. And the UN. And even the British who wanted to wait on the UN. And, god forbid, don't wait for the UN inspectors to finish their work - they might report there was nothing to find and we would be denied shock and awe!

And all that "intelligence". You know, the plagiarized student papers, the the forged documents, the blurry satellite photos, and aluminum tubes, among so much other fabricated material. Whoever could have seen through that? Certainly not a Yale graduate or his entire administration and military!

And now, Mr. SumDumAss, who trusts us "knowing" it leads to defeat?

How it is unconstitutional to use signing statements of the law can't be passed to cover him in the first place.

Not that I really understand that sentence but...it isn't unconstitutional to issue signing statements, it's unconstitutional to use them to pretend that the president can ignore parts of the bill to which it is attached because he issued them. The signing statement is a footnote, not a line item veto.

You see, here is where the problems arise, You don't know what all of his signing statements are and you just assum that congress has the ultimate authority over the other branches by passing a law. Well, here is a hint for you. The roles and positions the different branches play can't be don't by another branch because the constitution gives each of those branches the power ha

Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe

What the heck are they talking about? Butterfly wings have a colored powder that gives them their color. The summary author would know that if he/she had ever tried to catch a butterfly and looked at his/her fingertips afterwards.... The intensity of color is altered somewhat by interference with slits in a fashion similar to what they describe, but the fundamental color is defined by plain old pigmentation of scales on the wings.

http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/15.html

You might be able to get a little bit of color perception with a technique like this, but I doubt you're going to be able to get much intensity from reflected light with this technique without adding actual pigmentation to the mix, IMHO. Now if the light were being produced by a backlight behind the metal, then maybe....

Could not resist this: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.ht ml
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Solar power for what you pay now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

No Galileo was convicted of being a heretic because of a book he wrote and published "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" in which he mocked the pope.

http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-text-Galileo .html

-Will

It's "Daylight Saving Time," not "Daylight Savings Time." There's a difference. For an explanation on this and all things DST, see http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/b.html.

No! let's fire cannons in every street to wake people at dawn! http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin3.ht ml
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The Sun he gives light as soon as he rises: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Apparently because of some obscure oil-supply crisis in 1973, Congress decided to use the whole country as a guinea pig for a year and had everyone on DST between January 1974 and April 1975. Unfortunately some quango found that there was "statistically significant evidence of increased fatalities among school-age children in the mornings during the test period", so they scrapped it. Oops.

It's all just a psychological game, anyway; the actual amount of daylight obviously never changes, it's just that people really hate having to get up before their clock says they should, and thus it's necessary to fudge the clocks so that people get up earlier, and don't waste daylight and end up having it dark in their (clock-proscribed) "evening."

Heck, if you think that's bad, wait for this one - they were actually arguing about just switching to DST permanently, but the cows were against it. (Search for "cow") Heck, there's a lot of "cow" arguments against DST.

While I agree with you tinfoil hat statement, DST is tied to a war.. actually several, starting with WWI.

http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/e.html

Worldwide daylight saving -- In a world where we're doing things in real-time with people around the globe, this is an annoying mess with different countries observing DST at different times of the month. For the love of God, just standardize it internationally or don't do it at all!

I look forward to when this DST map is completely red and orange.

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784. Read the details in his essay, "An Economical Project." He came up with the idea to save money, as you would not need to burn candles in the dark if you got up when it became light.

Time doesn't change on the same dates year after year. See this short list.

but by chemists, Artists didnt even like it


The preparation of zinc oxide at the end of the eighteenth century made the development of cobalt green, also known as zinc green, possible.
The Swedish chemist, Rinmann is credited with developing a process for making a compound of cobalt and zinc in 1780 that he published with the Stockholm Academy of Sciences. Arthur Herbert Church published Rinmann's process in his book, The Chemistry of Paints and Painting. According to Church, cobalt green was made with the compounds of oxides of zinc and cobalt by mixing them "with an alkaline carbonate" and then exposing the mixture to strong heat. After washing the sediment that resulted, the pigment was ready to grind. The pigment was always bluish-green in spite of the ability to widely vary the proportion of zinc to cobalt oxides in production. The compound that is formed is chemically joined.

Cobalt green was a semi-transparent, moderately bright green. Most sources cited considered it to be absolutely permanent as most pigments produced at high temperatures are. However, tests made in 1847 and published in 1910 showed a browning of the color in full-strength and a fading of it when mixed with lead white. The colormaker, Blockx, added that the date of the tests bears certainty that the green was made by Rinmann's process,

Artists did not favor cobalt green although it could safely be mixed with all other pigments and was a fast drier in oil. The poor tinting strength and high cost of cobalt green kept it in limited use. Field called it, "chemically good and artistically bad"


history of cobalt green

How do computers do fare against Ishihara colorblindness tests? Besides helping prevent unauthorized intrusion, with certain layered test images, you can help the color vision impaired by accepting the values for both the impaired and unimpaired versions. See page 4 of the above link for how they are contructed.

The Off-topic Nazis say:

How many times do we have to say it: "Daylight Saving Time! Daylight Saving Time!" Please don't show your "s" about this!

You deserve to be modded up. Sadly, you probably won't be, because you're not slagging the U.S., Microsoft, or SCO...

Anyway, I digress. I just thought you made a good point. People love to invent grand conspiracy theories, especially when they can feature The Man forcing All Those Little People to change their clocks back from DST a month later. It's oppression! It's cultural genocide! It's an obvious plot by Halliburton to ... do something! Evil!

I think the tinfoil has gone to their heads.

For the record, I think Daylight Saving Time (no 'S' on saving, by the way) is a pretty slick idea, and a good manipulation of the fact that time is inherently arbitrary anyway. So why not make it work for us, or at least a little bit in our advantage, if we can? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

- The amount of oil predicted to be saved over the several weeks involved in the time shift, is less than all of the oil the USA uses in a SINGLE day.

While I agree this is not the most potent measure (following the links from NIST to webexhibits gives a figure of about 1% energy savings), anything that aids in getting the concept of conservation into the mainstream shouldn't be immediately derided as ineffectual. Let's be honest: any critical system will have an upgrade process for patching and this is the simplest patch in history. It's just changing one database of dates. Everything else? Mostly upgradable. The only things that won't be are watches, VCRs, microwaves, etc. that are dependent on time but not networked.

At this juncture, let it be. Explain to your parents how to set the time on their VCRs and then explain whatever new conservation energy bill has just been proposed as x number of daylight savings bills. It'll be the easy to comprehend benchmark, like "times the national debt" or "flaming Libraries of Congress".

From webexhibits.org:

Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories, is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states.

In Canada, currently the province of Saskatchewan doesn't observe it.

That's when Great Britain switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. See http://webexhibits.org/calendars/year-text-British .html

http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin.htm l

Here, franklin calculates the money and pounds of wax required to burn candles into the evening, while sleeping through the perfectly good hours of daylight in the early morning.

The lifestyle and architecture of modern man very rarely makes efficient use of natural light, to our peril: financially, healthwise [mental and physical], and societally.

That said, i really cant do anything to get to work much before 9:30. The earlier i get up, the longer i sit around the house.

But explain to me the significance of daylight savings time. I mean really.

In the pre-electricity "modern" era, families that stayed up after dark would light their homes with candles and oil lamps, which could get quite expensive ... The idea was proposed by Benjamin Franklin (known for his strong work ethic), that if the clocks were moved earlier towards the dawn in the summer, then there would be plenty of daylight in the evening after work, and thus countless candles and barrels of oil could be saved.

Extrapolating that to today, there is still a chronological swing to the usage of energy... in the bulk power industry, this is called a "load curve", and basically follows a sine wave... there's a valley in usage over the early morning period when everyone is asleep, and as people wake up, the load increases in the "morning ramp", reaches its peak in the afternoon, and drops off in the late evening as people head to sleep.

Now, moving the clocks to line up with the daylight periods would shift the energy usage one hour earlier in the day. In the morning in the summer, the sun is already up, so you're not going to save much electricity. However, by shifting the evening clocks forward, it removes some of the "lighting" time in the evening, which lowers load on the system, allows the generators that match load to drop their output lower earlier, they burn less fuel, and the economy as a whole saves money on imported fuel.

See http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/c.html

According to that (and other references) it not only saves ~1% of energy, it has the nice side-effect of giving us an hour more of daylight in the evening, when most people want it.

If you've ever had to rake leaves in the fall, you really notice when we revert to "normal" time and it's too dark to rake after work/dinner.

French Revolutionary War Calendar

Of course, the countries of the world that do change their clocks don't change their clocks at the same time. The EU starts DST on the last Sunday of March whereas we (currently) start ours on the first Sunday of April. Currently, we both end ours on the last Sunday of October.

If we're going to change how we handle DST, I'd recommend that we match the EU. I know that the idea of following the EU's lead is anathema to many of us, but hey, it's a small sacrifice and shows that we're willing to make compromises every so often.

Daylight Saving I always post this when the topic comes up. I'm a fan of Franklin and really enjoy reading this.

Sweden changed the DST period few years ago. As far as I remember there were no big problems.

What I'd prefer is that they passed a law making the hours between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm shorter.

Next thing you know Bush will make us use a calandar based on how many days it has been since Jesus died. That would be absurd.

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Rather than complain about the dupes today, I'll use them to be insightful and funny. Besides, I like THIS thread more than that other one.

/plagiarism

Titanium dioxide is the world's primary pigment for providing whiteness, brightness and opacity
History of Titanium Dioxide Whites

My house, like many others in England, is partly covered with a cement rendering and painted with white paint that uses Titanium dioxide pigment.
Cement Rendering

Ummm... you really need to learn how to differentiate between a linky and a sig...